Customer's Adoption Tip: Customize Your Own Wrike Manual

How do you introduce your team to a new software such as Wrike and get them so invested that they take to it like a fish takes to water?

When introducing any new tool to your entire team, the objectives are pretty straightforward: clarify how the new software can improve work, give the team detailed instructions on the process. And if you can provide an easy-to-scan cheat sheet that tells them how to use the tool for their daily work while enumerating the main functionalities of the software, even better!

This is exactly what one Wrike customer did. Lightspeed POS, is a cloud-based commerce solution for businesses, and Katelyn Good, their Manager of Marketing Strategy & Implementation, wanted her team to get the most out of Wrike from the get-go. Good assiduously examined their entire work process from where a job or a collateral might originate to how it gets assigned, executed, and approved. She then built a presentation that diagrammed it all. Along the way, she listed down best practices for using Wrike within their process. The result, while unique to how Lightspeed uses the tool, is a reference document that's digestible and full of useful info.

Below is the actual PDF of her presentation. Hopefully it serves as an inspiration for your own team's adoption!

The Genesis of "How to Get it Wrike"

Good shares how the document came about: "I created this short PowerPoint presentation and included all the things I thought would be useful if I were learning this tool. What are the questions I would ask myself before getting into it?"

She built the presentation and then shared it at a kickoff meeting the day before the full team implementation was scheduled. The point was to help the team understand the tool they were going to use. End result? A room of really receptive team members who could suddenly visualize how Wrike would help make their work better.

"Change can be a scary thing for a lot of people," says Good. "Especially if they're very ingrained in their processes. So I wanted to have a little bit of fun with it."

Lightspeed's Tips on Implementing Wrike

1. Know your process.
Good shares: "It's always good to really understand your process and make sure there's someone else — who knows the process as well as you do — who can validate or challenge you when laying it all out."

2. Clearly define projects versus tasks.
Having come from Trello, they initially put every bit of work into Wrike using nothing but tasks. Only later on, through a learning process, did they realize the benefits of using projects and defining when a team member should use them. "We decided that projects are any work requiring two or more teams," says Good.

3. Create a naming convention.
"This is probably the best thing we ever did," says Good. "Because no matter who took on the task or project, they knew the region, the product, the asset, the language, and the larger context of the project — all from the name of a task."

4. Take meeting notes in Wrike.
"Something we implemented pretty quickly was taking meeting notes," says Good. "So we have a meetings folder; the recurring meetings live there. And each time there's an action from a meeting, it becomes a task."

5. Create an internal help desk.
If you went through the PDF above, you might wonder who Betty is exactly. "Betty is my fictitious alter-ego," says Good. "She answers all the Wrike questions from the team." Good created Betty's folder and any time someone has a question about Wrike, they create a task in that folder and @mention Good so she can answer!

Listen to the entire recorded webinar with Katelyn Good from Lightspeed POS below:

Feel free to check out our community page where you can initiate a conversation with Katelyn Good regarding her team's Wrike adoption.